Druva sinks deeper backup hooks into AWS

Druva is improving its backup capabilities with AWS to offer a broader spread of data protection and archiving options.

In a briefing with Blocks & Files, Druva’s chief technical evangelist, W. Curtis Preston talked us through what the SaaS backup supplier is adding to its AWS data protection portfolio.

He started from the point that a business customer could have many accounts with Amazon, hundreds for example, with each account being equivalent to a user. Each account could use several AWS services and will often operate in a single Amazon geographic region. These regions are split into availability zones.

The business needs to manage all these accounts and ensure they are protected against availability zone and regional Amazon data centre failures, and also that data can be retained for the long haul.

With this in mind:

Druva can natively backup EBS, EC2 and Redshift,

It can now backup S3 in one region to a second region, protecting against a regional outage,

It can archive EBS snapshots for longer-term and less-expensive retention,

It can provide cross-account and cross-region disaster recovery (DR),

Global cross-account policy support is available, easing business account management.

Preston told us: “Backups of data in an account should not be stored in that account. If your account blows or malware gets in you can lose data. We automate doing DR to another account and another region.” Cross-account and cross-region protection is the way to go.

Druva itself runs inside AWS. It is unlikely to add the ability to operate inside Azure or Google Cloud Platform as it relies on Amazon’s DynamoDB to store details of customer data, down to groups of blocks. And this provides enormous scalability, Preston said.

For example, Druva can deliver global deduplication across a business’s accounts, because DynamoDB stores the huge amounts of metadata required and provides the fast access needed for the dedupe calculations to run. As we see it, there would be no Druva global dedupe without DynamoDB.

The general idea is that Druva can protect data inside AWS, wherever customers operate on or store it, and do it better than Amazon’s own backup services.

Preston told us Druva has just surpassed $100m annual recurring revenues, and that it has a greater than 100 per cent customer retention rate.

In case you are unfamiliar with this concept, when a customer renews for another term and increases their spend the retention rate is bean-counted as greater than 100 per cent. With subscription revenues, Preston said, “it’s as if you get growth built in every year”.